Gary snider essay

To talk about [Sager] being a professional or good at what he did is a tremendous understatement...[B]ut he was a way better person than he was a worker, even though he was amazing in that regard. He loved people, he enjoyed pregame, during games, postgame—he loved all the people around it, and everybody felt that... What he's endured, and the fight that he's put up, the courage that he's displayed during this situation is beyond my comprehension. And if any of us can display half the courage he has to stay on this planet, to live every [day] as if it's his last, we'd be well off. [34]

In “Seven is a Number in Magic,” a marauding gang of feral kids—close kin to William Burroughs’s Wild Boys, on “customized Schwinns and stolen bikes with raccoon tails flying from the handle bars…and mud flaps with red and orange reflectors and the Ace of Spades stuck in their spokes”—surround a gaggle of nurses, out for a night on the town. Slashing the young women “with silver car antennas like whips,” they steal their purses. When one of the nurses makes a run for it, a boy gives chase, “doing wheel stands and burning rubber right on her heels.” Lopping off her ear with a switchblade, he brandishes it in triumph. The next day, alone on a rooftop, he threads a leather thong through the ear and hangs it around his neck, a fetish object for the Lord of the Flies. “He stands up and raises a fist to the sky. The Gods are well pleased.”